


Snickers

by Kyn



Category: Left 4 Dead (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Hunters are basically mountain lions, Isolation, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Survival
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 21,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27925957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyn/pseuds/Kyn
Summary: Humanity seems functionally extinct.Traveling alone, and traveling light, one survivor has managed to keep moving for four years. One of the reasons for her success is that she's notexactlyalone. A chance encounter early on during the outbreak left her with an unlikely apocalypse buddy, and between her functioning brains and his sense of smell, they manage.
Relationships: OC/Hunter (Platonic)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 41





	1. Stupid Cat

She jogged, sweating in the autumn heat, and cupped her hands around her face to make a primitive amplifier.

"Snickers!" she hissed up at the buildings, but nothing answered her. Did she dare raise her voice louder? The town had _looked_ clear. Her guess was that the zombie populace had been drawn off a long time ago by the military bunker to the north. But that would have been years ago, and did not mean she was safe to shout _now._ "Damn it, I miss GPS. What I wouldn't give for a tracking device on this stupid _cat_ ," she growled, slowing down and panting. 

There was an old overturned tire filled with water nearby. Spotting it, she took a break in her search, knelt and pulled out her ceramic water filter, and dipped the nozzle into the water. Fresh water, at least, would get her through this muggy autumn afternoon. She pumped it through the filter and took a grateful sip of the result.

A murder of crows lined the telephone wires around her, unperturbed by her presence, some with bits of infected flesh clasped between their beaks. She sneered at them. "If any of you dare to mutate a bird flu version of all this, I'm going to finally give up and blow my brains out," she confessed as she hooked the water back to her side and lifted up her rifle. The scope worked in lieu of proper binoculars. 

Where was he?

She scanned the horizon down the street, but there was no sign of him. "I'm going to _kill_ him," she muttered. "Night's almost here and we're in the middle of a ghost town I haven't even finished scouting." It was time to risk shouting. "Snickers! _Snickers!"_ She started running again. "Where the hell are you!?" His absence was starting to scare her, and being scared tended to make her giddy, as she demonstrated with: "Here, kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty! Heeeerrreee kitty-kitty-kitty-!"

A cougar scream cracked the air.

Adrenaline rushed through her veins. She skid to a halt, glancing towards the nearby apartment buildings. Alright, she recognized that sort of call: Nothing like a lion or tiger roar, so not one of the spitters, or the tanks. She'd got _some_ hunter's attention, but there was no telling _which_. She slunk back against cover, glancing around and mostly _up_ to better anticipate its arrival. Her rifle found its cradle against her shoulder; her finger was fast against the trigger.

A rapid crackling and scraping of claws on brick made her spin around. She caught sight of a hunter slowing its fall only to repel off the wall and leap clear over her head. She twisted back, cheek still tucked to her rifle, to catch it landing on the dumpster beside her. It shrieked _directly_ into her face, its fanged maws spread wider than would have been humanly possible.

Her brain had quietly filled out a checklist of key identifying features: A clean, dark black hoodie; Neatly bandaged hands; Half missing jaw, the flesh torn away to reveal a gaping, toothy, perpetual smirk.

 _"Snickers_ , _"_ she sighed in relief, dropping the nose of her rifle and then affecting to wipe her face clean with her forearm. " _Thanks_. That was lovely fish breath."

He threw his head back, and what was left of his mouth tightened into a curling grin. He snorted, sniffled and chortled in his unique way– the way that had earned him his _name._

She shook her head, still more relieved then she could say, and came up beside him to pat his shoulder. "Yeah yeah. Laugh it up. Here I was all worried about you, thinking you might have tripped over a witch somewhere, and you've just been strolling about, enjoying the heat..."

He conjured up a rumbling wheeze, a _purr_ , in the back of his throat, and arched his back into her.

"Worst cat ever. Worst dog ever. Worst- Whatever you are, you're doing it wrong. I'm sure of it."

He wouldn't have risked drawing attention to her if he'd smelled anything even remotely dangerous. Snickers might not have understood _words_ , specifically, but the two of them had been together plenty long enough to learn to communicate through body language. For instance: When Snickers rolled over casually onto his back and flopped all four sets of claws into the air, it was a pretty good indicator this was one of the safest cities they'd ever been in.

"Hmph!" She rolled her eyes but indulged him for a moment, playing with his rake-like toes and letting him kick and paw harmlessly at her palms. Snickers knew, about as well as any other animal that had prowled the Earth before him, how to play gently. "Alright. Come on," she gave his side a hearty smack and then turned to head back towards the safehouse she'd been fortifying for the night, "time to get inside."

He mumbled and rolled back over onto all fours, languidly stretched himself out, and then bunched up for a jump. He leaped onto a building headed in roughly the right direction, and climbed to a decent vantage point. Hunters weren't particularly deadly on open ground, and as experienced as she and Snickers might have been in using teamwork to bring down enemy infected, synergy wasn't a free ticket to survival. His missing teeth had denied him many an important death blow, _particularly_ against other hunters.

A few building down, Snickers found a good ledge to trot across that was almost level with her head. She lifted a hand up casually to pet him as they walked.

"You know, just because you didn't run into anything doesn't mean this city's abandoned. You better hope there are no other _people_ hiding out here," she reminded _herself_ that more than she could ever successfully chastise him. "That ugly face of yours won't earn us too many friends, and people have got a bit of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy on undead nowadays."

He just trotted along, right as rain, an apex predator entirely secure in himself and his own abilities, and _positive_ that no nefarious interlopers would dare challenge him for territory. Looking at him all puffed up and smug made her want to scream 'Tank' at the top of her lungs just to scare the shit out of him. _That_ was one of the few human words he'd _definitely_ memorized. And when wasn't it funny to startle a cat? One might even argue it was good for them. Alleviated boredom or some such.

There was a Monty Python skit on this; there had to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They did, but it was "Confuse a Cat."
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tsIxNci_dE&ab_channel=BugsyPower


	2. As Absurd as it is Normal

Their safehouse for the night was a poorly barricaded apartment whose previous owner had long since succumbed to the Green Flu and wandered away. As she rolled out her sleeping map and bedding, Snickers nosed quietly through the cupboards, inspecting old tins of food for any signs of rupture or bloating.

Once upon a time, Snickers had insisted upon consuming an extensively compromised can of salted lamb meat, and she'd let him get his way– because who in their right mind would have expected a _zombie_ to get ill? Then he'd spent a week in the fetal position: limp, largely paralyzed, _wholly_ incontinent, and whimpering in pain.

Botulism, as it turned out, was one of those rare few toxins that still seemed to work on infected. Maybe that was because the toxin was _fungal_ rather than viral or bacterial, or perhaps it was because it could spread through the body on its own by spores without needing healthy cells to infect, or maybe it was just because it affected nerves directly. Whatever the case, she and Snickers had learned their lesson: Even zombies shouldn't eat improperly canned food.

While he scavenged for their dinner, she picked up an old television set and placed it quietly against the front doorway. Even the simplest of stumbling block could buy a person five seconds of badly needed reaction time, and almost _anything_ could hold off a subdued infected that hadn't yet been excited by sight or sound. She'd once protected a safehouse by tying a couple pieces of dental floss tight across the hallway; every time the infected had found their path blocked, they'd given up, turned around, and shambled back in the opposite direction.

Stumbling blocks also made it more likely her bear traps would catch hold of something.

As she worked, she could hear Snicker's dense, hard claws tapping across the tile kitchen flooring like a dog's nails. The sound left her momentarily nostalgic. Snickers, like all hunters, walked on his finger pads like they were ostrich toes, and used his knees like a second set of feet. Something must have excited him, because he spun about, trotted out to find her, and plopped his rump on the ground very much like a dog. She turned about to see him very nearly _oozing_ with glee, with an old battered can of StarKist tuna clasped between his damaged jaws. If he'd had a tail, it would have been wagging.

She smirked. "You want me to open that for you?" He bobbed his head and wiggled excitedly in place. "I see. And do you want me to heat it up?" He bobbed his head again. "Uh-huh. And you want me to get you a pink tutu?" Of course he bobbed his head again, because she was using the same tone and he didn't _really_ understand much beyond knowing that she had magical abilities to open things. With a grin, she reached out to pet him and then take the tuna. She produced their can opener, levered off the top, placed the can on top of a little grill, and lit a pillar candle to use underneath it as a 'fire.'

Snickers started salivating down the broken side of his face. His attention was riveted on that can. Carefully, she prodded it in a circle around the grill to ensure it cooked evenly.

"Alright," she called, and ran her belt knife around the meat to loosen it. "Can-seared tuna, by the world's last chef. Are you ready to show me your trick?"

Snickers got up on his knees and cupped his clawed hands, and looked for all the world like a trained seal ready to balance a beach ball on its nose. She used the knife to scrape the tuna out of the can and onto his open palms. With a skill born of careful training, Snickers got his mouth to his hands and his hands to his mouth, and ate greedily. No food was dropped, and Snickers didn't end up chasing bits and pieces around the floor or howling and throwing himself about when said food scraps escaped under old refrigerators and sagging couches. 

She settled back down and pet along his back. He purred wheezily between noisy munching. When he was done and had licked all the juices from his fingers, she rolled up a bit of toilet paper from the apartment bathroom and dabbed his face clean. He thrummed and tilted his head from side to side to let her help him.

Snickers didn't care for candy, found starchy foods bland, and seemed ambivalent towards both animal and vegetable fat. But after a month of eating plenty of smoked jerky, he'd grown strangely lethargic and starting gnawing on car fenders. In the interest of saving his poor teeth, she'd started "researching" his dietary requirements. With time and experimentation, she'd learned there were five major things a hunter needed from their food which directly improved their energy levels: He needed protein, he needed an unexpected high amount of iron, he needed a ton of salt, and he needed a bit of potassium. Those were the nutrients one could find in human blood. They were also the sort of nutrients one could get quite easily from canned fish.

And, lo, her hunter's interest in pickled sardines and canned tuna had finally been explained... And a whole lot of other questions had been raised. Questions about what would happen to the infected after the Green Flu had run its course and wiped the world clean of human habitation. Would the zombies die out? Starve? Were they already starving?

Snickers ambled back into the kitchen. She checked her solar batteries, quietly stapled towels over the apartment windows to make primitive black-out curtains, and then flipped on her nightlight. She listened to him rummage about in the cans. Eventually he squeezed some to his chest with one forearm and hobbled back to her on three limbs, and spilled them carefully into her work area without disturbing the candle. She picked them up to squint at the labels. He tended to pick her flavors _he_ thought were interesting.

The dinner he'd assembled for her consisted of condensed milk, peanut butter, green peas, whole date fruits, and mashed pumpkin. She fed him a spoonful of each just to taste, and then they sat together in companionable silence while she ate the rest. He tilted his head back and gave a big and toothy yawn. She rubbed his back. He took this as an invitation to flop into her lap. She scratched over his hood.

"I wish I had a goal," she confessed to her purring cat. "Somewhere to go. Someone to save. Something to do."

Out of the two of them, he was probably the happier one. He didn't need his life to have meaning, he just needed food in his belly, a city to play in, and someplace dry to sleep each night. Meeting The-One-Who-Can-Open-Closed-Objects had eliminated one of the only forms of uncertainty from his life, and apparently killed off a great deal of his instinctive aggression in the process. 

She cleaned up after dinner and then climbed into her overlarge bedroll for the evening. Snickers walked all over her before finally nosing under the blankets, upside down. He gave no indication that he disliked his predicament, and instead curled up in a ball on top of her feet in a position any contortionist would have envied. This was as absurd as it was normal, and she fell asleep knowing that her toes, at least, would never need to fear the dark.


	3. Flashback 1: The End

_Flashback_

By the time the last of the men had died, she wasn't gaping at their remains anymore. She wasn't even _looking_. She heard a squeal from behind her, a noise of terror befitting a pig, followed by snapping tendons and tearing flesh, and the guttural vocalizations of feasting runners. Wet red was splashed her from behind. He was still screaming and the screams chased her.

A runner threw itself at her with a croaking bellow. She shouldered past with a strength she didn't actually possess; straining her arm, but she felt nothing, _nothing,_ but the _pounding pounding pounding_ of omnipresent fear.

She got in the safehouse door.   
She heaved it shut.   
She threw down the barricade.

A thousand infected slams fell up against the other side, howling, pounding, _begging_ to be let inside, to finish her, to _dine_. The door held.

Somewhere beyond, a man was yet screaming. Her memory refused to conjure his name. Refused to remember _anyone's_ names.

Her machete clattered from her hands. She slid to the ground and hugged her knees and she became the physical incarnation of tears and terror; her psyche searching for a hole in the world where people could fall in and disappear from existence. It wasn't fair that the only route to nonexistence was death. 

Death was too horrible to face.

This wasn't a role she was equipped for. If someone had only _told_ her, she would have backed up and done things differently. She would have learned a sport. Joined the military. Fallen in with the wrong crowd and joined a gang. Anything. _Anything_ to have any potential to earn her next breath. Nothing she had ever done had prepared her for _this._

The world spun apart into a colored morass of distress. She crumpled to the ground. She whimpered. She _fought._ She shook her head and valiantly propped herself up again. A cut in her side was bleeding, and she needed to fix that. Yeah. _Yeah,_ that was something she could figure out how to do. _Maybe._

'Maybe' was enough.

She doggedly grabbed at the handle of her machete, and crawled across the ground because she lacked the strength to do much else. Some medical supplies were stacked in the corner, and she took one case and opened it gingerly to inspect the contents.

She took off her jacket, and her shirt. She cleaned herself of grime and sweat, wincing and sniffling at each jab of pain. It was a bullet wound, but it wasn't bad; it hadn't gone in her, just skimmed her. She had to decide whether to let it breathe or stitch it shut. She decided to stitch it, because that was harder and scarier and maybe if she just _forced_ herself through each stitch, then she'd _deserve_ to heal.

When it was done, and she had dabbed herself in ointments and wrapped up the injury again, she felt spent. She let her head thud back against the wall, and she stared vacantly. All the energy was gone, and so was all the fear and all the tears, and she felt fuzzy like her head was stuffed with cotton.

Something moved.

At first, she assumed it was a rat. Then she realized it was much larger, and she turned to see a sinuous humanoid figure with its belly to the ground, slinking across the middle of the room in a deathly silence. Its fingertips were splayed out and overgrown with black nails, each thick and hard and broad. It wore its hood low; its clothing was bloody and torn, and its sleeves had been battened down with a wrap of gymnast's tape.

She kicked herself out of her slump, scrabbling for her machete.

_I'm dead._

The hunter's back went up in an arch, but instead of _shrieking,_ it loosed the most unexpected, frightening, croaking noise she could have imagined. It sounded like the ghost from The Ring. It sounded like a crocodile, or something else without vocal cords, and the rattle of it all stretched on like a menacing, recurrent death threat. But as disturbing as the sound might have been, she _did_ note that hunters, typically, sounded very different from this whenever they were leaping from tall buildings to murder people.

The croak trailed off slowly. No death leap ever came. The zombie seemed to be staring at her, and she was sure as hell staring at it. (Him?)

After a long moment, he moved: He _slowly_ eased one of his hands forward, and then the other, and followed them at a crawl; he shuffled one pace closer to her, and then another. Light fell across the lower portion of his face.

The jaw was missing on one side, along with all the flesh and muscle that had previously supported it. The majority of the upper lip was gone on that side, and the tissue of the cheek had been torn raggedly back towards the joint. The remaining half of the lower jaw was bruised and swollen to the point that there was no room inside the mouth for a tongue, which was limed in puss and dangled out the hole. Flaps of skin and tissue hung torn and shredded. By the look of things, the hunter had been hit point blank in the face with a payload of birdshot-

-maggots! _Maggots!_ His wounds were visibly _writhing with maggots!_

She kicked back away from him in a revulsion she struggled to contain, feeling bile rising up in her throat.

The hunter's back arched again, and his croak returned louder than before.

She froze.

Another moment passed between them. When she didn't make any further movements, he quickly leaned forward, opened his broken mouth, and seized up her bloody jacket with his remaining teeth. Then he scurried backwards into the dark, dragging his 'prey' with him.

Oh God. Oh _God._

Gun. She needed a gun. She clambered to her feet and stalked determinately about the better-lit half of the safe house. Were there weapons in there? Please. Yes! A rifle, one. She took it and loaded it in the way she'd so recently been taught. There. She brought the butt of the weapon to her shoulder, and slowly crept in the direction the hunter had disappeared in.

She found a wood crate which had been divested of peanut butter and medical pills. Sitting in said crate with the lid balanced atop his head, and kneading her torn jacket between his swollen gums, was the hunter. He looked much too large for his incredibly square confines, but, on seeing her approach, he croaked and ducked down so that the crate lid shut on top of him. She took a deep breath and nosed the barrel of her gun forward, using it to lift up the edge of the crate. She aimed for his head.

He batted at the barrel of her gun.

She readjusted her aim. He forced a yowl out through what she imagined were sorely inflamed vocal cords, and batted repeatedly at her gun. His manner was reproachful, like a cat slapping an encroaching vacuum cleaner hose. When she kept trying to get a bead on his head, he leaped out of the crate, bounded away from her, slowed to a haughty strut, and dragged her jacket off towards a cupboard on the far side of the room.

She stared after him in dismay.

 _Now what?_ Lacking the heart required to chase down and murder the apocalypse's one and only disinterested(?) zombie, she stumbled back over to where she'd left her medical supplies, and sank back into a puddle of herself. Well. _Now what?_

...She knew that a person could technically kill themselves with a rifle, but they had to use their toe to pull the trigger. Was that a feasible option here? Shooting herself?

She reached for her purse and wondered why she was even still carrying the thing. She overturned it, and emptied it, and watched coins and check books and phones and all sorts of other useless things go rolling away. She knocked aside cigarettes and reached for her jar of insomnia pills, because supposedly that was one way to do it: To end it without losing the nerve to end it. Falling asleep sounded like one hell of a peaceful way to go, all things considered.

Her fingers brushed up against a can of gourmet cat food, a treat she'd purchased for the neighborhood stray on her way home from work that fateful evening.

She slumped back into puddlehood. This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair.

_Everything is gone forever. None of it is coming back. Not jobs. Not strays._

When she could move again, she found a pen and paper among the supplies in the safe house, and she wrote out a letter to her family: to her mother, and father, and brother; to that stray cat she'd never see again; to her coworkers. They were dead. And she wasn't, not yet. She took her old cigarette lighter, and lit up the letter. She watched it burn. She was exhausted, and her eyes were red and salty from tears, and she probably needed to sleep.

Her eyes found the can again, the cat food can. She reached out to it, and picked it up in her hands. More tears came; even though she was sure she'd been out of tears. She lifted up the tab on the top of the can, and pulled the lid off.

Walking on legs that felt like lead, she stumbled over to the cupboard where the hunter had disappeared, and she set down the can.

She walked back to her things. She slumped. She looked at her wallet, and the pictures of her family. She contemplated the gun and took off one of her shoes and her sock, but then picked up the insomnia medication and took four times the recommended dose. Would that be enough? As she curled up to sleep, she hoped so.


	4. Ham and Baked Beans

_Flashback Continues_

She didn't die.

Instead, when she finally woke up, she merely felt like she'd been hit by a rampaging bull. Or a truck. Or perhaps a small moon. She leaked tears onto the smooth concrete, and breathed in wretched sniffles. She wasn't dead. She was just... what? Hungover, maybe.

There were talons in front of her. _Big ones._ She jolted in place, scrabbling for purchase on the concrete floor. The hunter perched right beside her, with his hands flat on the ground and his head lowered. Dark, unblinking, glistening eyes stared

"Shit," she mouthed, just before the hunter's swollen jaws slid open and-!

He growled, only it wasn't really much of a growl. IMore like a pitchy sort of whine.

She swallowed past a dry lump in her throat, trying to push herself to a seat. "I... Um..." She needed water.

The hunter continued to stare at her, and stared at her, and started at her; until a solid five minutes must have drifted by she was nearly jumping out of her skin with adrenaline. Very abruptly, he leaned over and sniffed at her face, and she got a wonderful view of the extensive damage he'd suffered to the left side of his face. It was a whole _ecosystem_ in there. Her stomach rolled, and saliva built up in the back of her mouth, and she knew she was about to vomit.

Just as quickly, he lifted his head back up, turned his back towards her, ambled five paces away away, and sat there facing away from her as if to drive home just how disinteresting she was.

She gaped after him, still struggling with intense nausea.

It took a few tries for her to slowly push herself upright. Then she really did have to go puke and wash out her mouth and chug some water (and puke again, and wash out her mouth again, and then drink some water more slowly and carefully on the second try). When she'd finally sat her shaking self back down and was trying to get her bearings on what to do next, she noticed the hunter still sitting there, still blatantly... (what was he doing, exactly? Ignoring her?)

She looked away from him, and recalled that she probably needed to eat. Not that any food sounded very good, but she made it a habit to _always_ eat when she felt sick. And had she eaten much over the last few days? No, she hadn't.

Nails tapped over the ground. She glanced over to see the hunter had twisted about to look at her. The moment she noticed him, he looked away again.

_The hell?_

Focus. Focus. Don't look at the confusing thing. Don't deal with the difficult problems. Just: Eat. She looked away from him again and got up to go inspect the crates. Peanut butter sounded like hell to her dry throat. Peaches sounded nauseatingly sweet. The only third choice was canned ham. Grimacing, she reached in to pick up a can of the meat, and noted it had been packed with baked beans. It sounded horrible in the moment, but at least it would keep her alive. And it had an easy pull tab. She opened up the lid, and grimaced at the smell of food.

Nails tapped across the ground beside her feet, and she looked down to see the hunter only a few feet away, his attention fixated on the can she was holding. His nostrils flared and lip tissue twitched with interest.

"You want it?" she croaked.

He didn't move.

After a moment, she knelt down and slowly upended the can of ham and baked beans onto the ground. She shook it to get all the sauce out, and then scooted over and away from it. The hunter's attention stayed riveted on the food. The seconds ticked by.

He slunk forward, sniffed at the pile, and pawed at it slightly. When nothing terrible happened, he hunkered down right there to eat it, smearing it and sauce and beans all over the place. He ate the meat. He chased down all the beans. He licked up every last tiny milligram of sauce. He licked out the inside of the can. Only when absolutely nothing remained of the food did he turn his attention back to her.

Another long pause swam slowly by. Then he padded up beside her, and sat down _right there,_ no more than a foot away, with his head bowed and his nails tense against the floor.

She frowned at him, and at the secondary infestation going on in the broken parts of his face. He wove his weight slightly between his right and his left. Then a low, nasal, gravelly wheeze came up from the depths of his chest. In and out, it continued, in and out, repetitive and rumbling. He sat there, rocking himself, purring, _dripping_.

She lifted a hand, uncurled her fingers, and gingerly reached towards him. Slowly, _slowly,_ even though they were already so close. She touched the wraps at his arm, and then the shoulder of his hoodie, and then the hood itself. He ducked his head a little and kept purring and rocking.

Because if there was anything a mammalian carnivore might possibly be expected to understand, it was that sharing food was something one only did with _one's own team_. Disbelief or giddiness kept her there, petting the world's ugliest hunter. Petting the world's ugliest _cat_.


	5. Foreign entities

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flashback - Continued

The average animal would have grown depressed and stopped eating altogether, but every whiff the hunter caught of food had seemed to make him that more determined to survive. No matter what she gave him to nom on, he would somehow eat it. Out of pity, she stuck with the easiest and softest foods possible. If she'd been a real sadist, she would have given him the peanut butter.

It took her the better part of a week to work up the courage she needed to leave the safe house. When she stepped out that front door, he followed immediately at her heel. His suspicious glares from left to right had suggested he was no more comfortable out in the world than she was, but perhaps he'd appreciated the need to move. So they'd slunk across the city together, dodging signs of movement from shadow to shadow.

When they finally found another hole to crawl into for the night, she was exhausted. She wasn't the only one. No sooner had the hunter crossed the threshold of the safehouse before he'd suddenly gone limp, and collapsed into a heap on the floor.

She straightened in surprise, dragged his legs out of the way of the safehouse, closed the door, and knelt by him.

"Hey. Hey? You okay?"

His talons twitched, but he did not otherwise move.

Concerned, she stood up and quickly rummaged around the safehouse. Was there any food? Maybe. The room had already sheltered survivors several times, that much was clear, but a quick and pointed survey found some cans which had rolled under a cabinet. She dragged them out used a discarded bottle opener to slowly punch holes all the way around the rim. There. Open.

She came back to her hunter's side (her cat's side?) and pushed the can up next to his face. "Hey... Can you smell that?" she asked as she awkwardly pet his back.

His talons shifted, and he lifted his head slightly.

"Yeah," she coaxed, "it's yummy." The smell did seem to have a revitalizing effect on him, or at least it galvanized him into saving himself. He slowly propped himself up. His arms shook.

"God." She stooped to catch him as he nearly fell into the can. "You're in a bad way. Lay on your side? Lay on your side."

He slumped down on his right shoulder, breathing heavily.

"Just relax. Just... just..." she didn't know what to say to someone who was so obviously ill. The idea that a zombie could be _ill_ was ridiculous but, then, infected weren't exactly undead. She scooped up tuna on her finger, and then brought the meat up to his tortured face. "H-here..." He tried to lift his head a little. She grimaced, and pushed the meat past the fragments of his dripping mouth and onto his tongue. He tilted his head back a little, and it took him three attempts to swallow the food.

Dismayed, she sat down beside him. His face was a disaster. After days of watching him chewing slowly, determinedly, and painfully past inflamed gums and swollen facial muscles, this was the first time she had the courage to take a closer look at his condition?

(Maggots, maggots maggots- gyaahhhhhhurrrggghh!) _Did_ she have the courage to examine him?

She took in a long, slow breath. Then she set the tuna down and leaned over him and placed her hands hesitantly against his swollen jaw muscles. She felt gingerly back and forward. Were... were those swollen glands she was palpating? He whirred at her, a feliform mixture of a growl and a whine. At first he whirred quietly. Then, as she prodded at the swollen gums, he whirred louder. She glanced up towards his hood. Was he warning her that he might _bite_ her if she continued, or was he trying to answer the unspoken 'does it hurt here?' question?

She could see his eyes, somewhat, up under the edge of the hood. They were black. Completely black, and very nearly lidless.

His nostrils flared. Then he opened his mouth slowly, stretching open hurting muscles to let her see the extent of this immense injury. She grimaced at the smell of necrotic flesh, and at the sight of white worms.

"God. I..." she hesitated. Then she dug around in her new backpack, and pulled out a jar of ibuprofen. Would it help? there was _so_ much wrong with this situation. But ibuprofen was an anti inflammatory drug... and if it worked, then maybe the swelling would go down and he could at least eat, and then she might stand a chance at addressing the _next_ tier of problems afflicting him. "Just... just give me a second." She spooned up some more tuna onto her fingertips, and began pressing pills into the meat. Then she leaned over him and eased the sneaky medicine onto his tongue, and watched anxiously as he managed to swallow it.

Saline solution. She needed to find saline solution in one of these first aid kits, because that was the sort of thing you were supposed to wash out wounds with. And then, if she remembered, you were supposed to snip off excess dead tissue. If she could find some tweezers and some scissors, she might be able to clean up his cheek and mouth of all those... foreign entities.


	6. Build Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We Continue to Flashback

When she woke up it was without renewed energy; she felt drained and most probably depressed. She hadn't seen another person in days. As she lay there, miserable, she gradually became aware of a heat beside her legs, and that somehow started to dispel her misery. When she finally gathered the strength to sit up and take stock of her situation, she found the hunter had crawled up beside her and was curled up on himself against the back of her knee.

Ew.

She wiped her leg clean of hypothetical zombie cooties but then sat forward and leaned over him. He was resting in a puddle of his own saliva, though that was hardly his fault given the state of his face. More importantly, the swelling looked to have been dramatically reduced. She'd cleaned up all the ragged tissue she'd been able to identify the night before, but there were many points she hadn't been able to decide what was dead and might be salvageable. It wasn't as if infected looked particularly _healthy_ even on their best days; covered in blisters and nodules, with a gray pallor and general undertones of green instead of red. 

She leaned this way and that to appraise his condition. He was alive. He had the fingers of both hands splayed over his now-empty can of tuna, so he'd managed to eat it. She reached down to touch the edge of his hood and draw it back. He jumped unexpectedly and snarled, and she jerked her fingers back just in time to avoid a snap of sharp teeth. "Hey-!"

He went still, and tilted his head back just enough that she could see his featureless black eyes on her.

"I... I only startled you?" Maybe. Hopefully. "It's okay..." She reached towards him again, and he did not growl as she touch the side of the hood. "That's a good... kitty. A goooood, not-witch, accidentally-startled, but now smart-enough-not-to-bite-me kitty..."

She was asking to be jinxed right then, but irony was on her side that morning. The 'kitty' let her slip her hand into his hood and feel over the skin of his cheek. She was able to feel that he definitely still had lymph nodes along his throat, and that the nodules had shrunk noticeably in size and firmness. His nostrils flared at her as she touched him. Then he sank back down into the concrete, plopped his head into the cradle of his arms, and wheezed contentedly.

She had to smile, because this stupid _cat_ was the best thing that had happened to her in over a week. And then she had to tear up a little, because the non-hostile temperament of a severely injured special infected was the _best_ thing that had happened to her in over a week. Life—for the whole world and everyone in it—presently sucked.

She took in a deep breath to steady herself, and then leaned over again and set to scratching the hunter's back. He twitched a little at first, sniffled and snorted uncertainly, and then wheezed louder as a demonstration that this sort of attention was permitted to continue.

"That's a good kitty-cat," she murmured weakly.

If he'd let her, she needed to have a look at his gums and teeth now that the swelling was down. She'd see if there was any birdshot lodged in there that might be contributing to his condition. And she needed to have a look down his throat. If the Green Flu was still causing mucus build-up post mutation, for example, then the extra swelling might be making it difficult for him to breathe. If that was the case, every house in America had stocked up on expectorants over the last few months, and she could certainly manage to loot a bottle of the stuff. Her success with the ibuprofen was bolstering her confidence, and at least this gave her some sort of milestone to achieve.

Her nails caught on a tear in his hoodie and he winced slightly but did not stop his 'purring.' She glanced down at him and frowned. Was something else wrong with him, that scratching him could feel painful? After a moment, she leaned about him and scouted out the back hems of his hoodie and shirt, ragged and oily and dirty as they were. She lifted up the material, and immediately saw rashes everywhere. Startled, she pulled up the fabric a little further, and then tried to get a look through the torn front of the hoodie at his arm.

Dead skin had built up on his flesh at a much faster rate than she'd have expected in a human. The dead skin cracked open into lesions everywhere his skin folded over on itself, such as at the armpits, neck, and elbows. It was also particularly bad in places such as the hem, where wet and dirty clothing had chafed. He had oozing sores and warts all along his skin, like a person with severe eczema who had contracted a bad fungal infection.

 _This_ was a project all on its own! This needed sponges, Epson salts, liquid bandages, a loofah, a _sander_ , lotion, oil-!

She looked down at his face (what was left of it), and took in a slow breath. "You know, you're very lucky you have me," she informed him. "As clearly you have been stripped of every instinct—aside from _eating—_ which any animal would possibly need to know about surviving in the wild. You can jump off roofs and land without injury, but are completely unaware of your own body, and do not even appear to know you have thumbs."

Her companion just kept wheezing his eerie purr, and left the bigger things like the rationalization of the Green Flu and the speculation on infected psychology to her.


	7. Moot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flashbacking for So Long, you Probably Forgot What Was Happening in the Present

The next day came and went, and still the hunter remained largely incapacitated by fever and inflammation of the mouth.

She left the safe house then, because its supplies were insufficient for her needs and it was time to move on. She spent the day working her way to an uninhabited super market. Most of the day, she spent creeping around back alleyways trying approach the building from an angle that felt safe. Once inside, she gathered as many supplies as she could carry and holed up under the returns desk to try and feel safe while she was feeding herself. 

She tried to remember the names of the people who had taught her to load a rifle and shoot it, or wield a machete without jarring her elbow and dropping the weapon. But she couldn't remember anything. Nothing. Names and faces were blotted out, and only voices remained, voices that offered anxious advice and screamed out in agony at the end. Their faces and names were replaced by sun chips and chocolate bars, layered over by whatever random access information needed temporary housing in her brain.

She curled up to sleep, because this place was as safe as any, but a wall stocked with cat food, aluminum foil, and saran wrap stared out at her from across the hall.

Sleep didn't come. 

She couldn't remember the names and faces of the person who'd taught her to shoot, but she could vividly remember the sight of a special infected curled up on a safehouse floor, dying of a shotgun's worth of buckshot to the face.

She wondered if the hunter had _killed_ whomever it was that had shot him, or if he'd taken the hit while tearing into a group mate or family member, and then only successfully fled the altercation because the humans had been too distracted trying to save their own to follow him. After a time, she realized the whole question was irrelevant, because there was no optimism left in this life: She was one hundred percent certain the hunter had killed people. Killed them, and then eaten them.

The wall of cat food continued to stare at her. 

Some strange thing like _guilt_ drove her back to the storehouse in the wee early morning hours, when surely every other moving thing could see more easily than she could, and whilst zombies in general were enjoying a sun-free sky. She slipped shakily through the doors after sidestepping a crying witch, and slowly eased the door shut so as not to startle her with any loud noises.

"Kitty...?" she whispered into the darkness, and wondered if she was insane.

A wheeze drifted up from beside the door, and she looked down to see him just beside her ankle, curled up against the side of the safe house with his black gaze turned up towards her. He wheezed again, and choked a little, and then purred, and purred.

She knelt slowly down beside him, and gathered his disgusting head slowly up in her arms, and felt his throat and the tears in his face and the warts and eczema scales about his collar bone and the back of his neck. She swallowed past a hard lump in her throat, and then scooted and tugged until she'd gotten her knees underneath him and his head and shoulders into her lap. He was so filthy, and so pathetic, and he _drooled_ , and she pet over him and sagged her weight into the wall of the safe house.

"Okay," she affirmed. "I won't abandon you, and you don't eat me. _Capisce_? I got some tweezers, Listerine, an expectorant, and dental picks. And some sulfur soap for your skin."

Kitty oozed contentedly into her, and didn't even beg for food.


	8. Nom First, Questions Later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yup, Still Flashbacking

It had been two days since she'd seen a maggot crawl out of that ugly, lopsided, torn and pitted mouth of his, and three days since she'd dug out the last pellet of bird shot with tweezers originally designed for pulling out porcupine quills. By then the tongue actually looked to be healing, which surprised her her even amidst constant reminders that Green Flu zombies were still rather 'alive.' Wasn't it evidence enough enough of life that 'kitty' seemed to be fevering?

If a week of digging about in a hunter's fanged mouth with tweezers and dental floss had taught her anything, it was that 'kitty' had no particularly inescapable urge to chomp down on human fingertips; which raised the question of why every other Green Flu zombie seemed to operate on a nom-first-and-ask-questions-later sort of policy.

Well, that labeling wasn't entirely true: Witches appeared to be more _violently defensive_ than anything else. Did Tanks get irritated with things other than humans and start pounding random inanimate objects into paste?

She didn't know. Who could have known? Who exactly had insight into how zombies worked when uninfected weren't around? No one. The world had gone to hell, and there was no one to conduct scientific inquiry on these topics. There were no answers. Existence was lack of answers. Existence was chaos.

Existence was grounded by a routine, now: forage, eat, feed kitty, work on kitty's face, work on kitty's skin, sleep; forage, eat, feed kitty, work on kitty's face, work on kitty's skin, sleep. Every new object had two sets of qualifications to be judged by: a) was it food? b) might it help repair a fevering, ill, and damaged hunter?

It wasn't that she was particularly _good_ at nursing him back to health—it took her days just to realize she ought to be giving him water—but an ailing 'kitty' gave her something to care about, and he never complained.

So as the days passed, she gathered clean linens while foraging, and laid them out to work on. She cut his clothing off with scissors and bathed him with water mixed with sulfur soaps and sandalwood and anti-fungal ointment and Epson salts; anything to try and exfoliate layers and layers of psoriasis, or whatever it was that caused his skin to build up in thick scales and put him at risk for gangrene.

He didn't seem to like being without clothing, and rolled himself up in the linens like an anxious burrito after his baths, which suited her mental image of him just fine. She found him new clothing.

She also poked around the tissues of his damaged mouth every day. A little bit of pink seemed to be coming back in places- just enough to wonder if he might be mending. Somewhat randomly, she had ended up looting a small historical building and found a book about wartime medics which indicated that 'kitty's' maggot infestation may have saved his life by stripping away decaying tissue. 

Well, it had been two days since she'd seen a maggot, and three days since she'd dug out the last pellet of bird shot, and since some pink had come back into her mouth.

And when she came home from foraging, on that day, her hunter was simply gone.

His fever had broken. His face had started healing. His skin infections had been largely wiped out. Clearly, he had been able to stand.

And so now all that was left to her were the soiled linens, and many, many, many discarded cans of food. At least he hadn't eaten _her._

But the loss of any sense of purpose hit her so hard that she ended up curled up in the floor in a ball with her flashlight in hand, crying for her mother and asking God why he'd sent such a flood to kill them all.

* * *

She woke when something squishy and wet slapped up against her face. Survival instincts and general disgust made her recoil from the touch, and she peered groggily past eyelids dry and raw from saline.

The tip of a Smoker tongue, blistered and boiled, was hanging right there in front of her eyes, bobbing up and down like the long tail end of an oily black slug, with its tip twitching and coiling as if by reflex.

Survival instincts were not enough to stem the _scream_ which shot out from the depths of her lungs, especially not when the smoker tongue lolled forward and smacked her right upside the face again. Scream she did, and loudly at that, as she leaped to her feet and fumbled blindly for any weapon at all.

The Smoker tongue did not pursue her. Instead, a sloppy, wheezy little chortle leaked out from the air above her.

She looked up. There, perched among shattered glass and broken boards in a high window at the top of the safe-house, was the dark profile of a hunter. He looked to be wearing raincoat, and was using the hood to shield his eyes. He wasn't wearing any pants, which gave her a _wonderful_ underside view of nothing worth getting particularly excited about, but which all the same really ought to be put away somewhere. He had one set of blood-encrusted toe-claws buried in the decapitated head of a Smoker, and was using a hand to dangle the tongue down like a fishing lure or cat toy.

Most importantly, he was missing a significant chunk of his face.

"Wh..." she breathed, gaping up uncertainly towards him and scrabbling for her flashlight, whose batteries she really ought to have been conserving. He... He _looked_ healthy and alert. Did he remember she'd helped him? He wheezed a little harder, a sound she'd come to associate with contentment. Her flashlight illuminated the lower half of his face, and saw the remainder of his lips had curled into a tight, almost mischievous grin. He snorted and sniffed, and grinned and grinned and grinned.

"Y-you..." she hesitated. "What are... what are you _giggling_ about?"

He gave the tongue a little wiggle and she jumped. He wheezed, his tattered lips parting to show off more pointy teeth (or what was left of them), as he chortled and hissed all in one.

"Oh yeah? Laugh it up Fuzzball." Her voice didn't sound worried, not even to her own ears. She sounded as if she were drawling. As if she were _teasing_. She'd just made a Star Wars reference.

He moved then, dropping the Smoker head off the wall behind him, and the tongue zipped up after it as it splattered some place on the outside. He crawled vertically down the wall, his dark talons curling into the boards and leaving little gouges behind as he rather effortlessly slithered down to the ground floor. He came up to her, more lizard than man, and—amidst a long and rumbling wheeze—he rubbed up his shoulder and side against her leg. He smelled of blood and rain and mud.

She craned over and gingerly touched at the edge of his hood. He surprised her in twisting about swiftly to look straight at her with bared teeth, and she jerked her hand away from him like she'd been stung. She could see his eyes at this range—lidless black orbs—and she should see the skin about them was creased in primitive joy. He closed his teeth, his lips curled, and he snorted and snuffled out another happy wheeze.

"You think scaring me's funny?" she reproached him. "Huh? That's what you think, Giggles?"

He hummed, and butted his face harmlessly into her leg, and snickered some more. _That_ was the word for what he was doing: _Snickering_.

She knelt slowly, touching his hood and then looking at his filthy hands at feet. He'd cut or scraped himself in several places but seemed not to notice or at least not to mind. "I thought you'd left," she mumbled somberly as she pet over the side of his jaw. She could feel no lymph nodes, now. "You gonna eat me?"

He butted his head into her shoulder again, and rubbed up against her. If he'd had a tail it either would have been wagging or else curling about all superciliously behind him.

She twisted about and rummaged in their surroundings for an unopened can of processed chicken. Immediately he stopped laughing and gave an eager noise, and turned himself about to stare at her magical can-opening hands with rapt attention. She pulled the lid free and upended the result in front of him. Her 'kitty' pounced upon the meat, pressing his damaged face into the mound of white chunks and gobbling them all up in a very messing fashion. She pet him. He leaned into her as he at.

"I'm calling you _Snickers,_ " she told him. "That's your name now. Got it, Snickers? And if you think it's fun pranking me, you just remember who it is who _feeds_ you now."

Snickers lifted up his head, extended a pointed tongue easily eight inches in length, and proceeded to give her the single biggest, sloppiest, goopiest lick she had ever had the misfortune to endure.


	9. Morbid Future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Present Day. 
> 
> (Flashback Ended)
> 
> Our intrepid heroes were barricaded up in a city so vacant that no zombies showed up even while she was running through the streets calling for him. We can presume this means it's been a long time since the initial green flu outbreak, and long after the setting of the two Left 4 Dead games.

Snickers crawled out of her bedroll somewhere around dawn, and went to stretch himself out before the apartment's broken windows. He buried his (already hooded) face into his forearms, and soaked in the heat of the morning sunrise.

Without eyelids, and with pupils as wide around as the socket, Hunters had no natural protection from sunlight. They were exclusively equipped for hunting in the darkness. Even when the sky was overcast, Snickers relied much more on other senses than on vision; and he wouldn't go out prowling under a naked sun at all—not unless she blindfolded him first.

Of course, he _was_ secretly a giant cat, after all, so he _would_ lay out basking in a sunlit room all day if she let him, provided he felt safe and provided that his face was well-covered.

Maybe today was just that sort of day, though: A rest day. Well, then she wanted to steal some sunshine, too. She rolled sleepily off of her mat, dragged it over to the window, and bundled herself up against Snickers's flank. He was happy enough to be a pillow, and he was clean enough not to stink. She dozed, content enough with the present to pause worrying about the larger state of the world. Ranging about with only a Hunter for companion could be a lonely way to live out the rest of her days but, at the very least, it was better than dying suddenly, painfully, and utterly alone.

She slept in several hours, and then lazed about conducting small but long-overdue maintenance work on various articles of gear: oiling hinges, stitching tight loose corners, gluing odds and sharpening ends. When her rear end began protesting such an abnormal lack of exercise, she got herself up and paced about and stretched. Snickers yawned and stretched back and forth, rolling about on his back with his arms and legs all curled up and one forearm battened against his hood to keep the sunlight at bay.

Even though Snickers had once been human, the Green Flu had changed his anatomy enough to classify him as a different species . He was a _Hunter_ : His tendons and muscles rested easiest in a 'coiled' position instead of an 'extended' one. The curves of his shoulder-blades and clavicles had been mutated and distorted on even a skeletal level. His skin was not smooth; he sported thickened, coarse ridges across the length of his back and and limbs that reminded her faintly of Crocodile scutes, but which were at least clean of lesions and grime.

Most of Snickers's competition wasn't as lucky on that last point, and suffered from some degree of fungal infection. After all, few of them had the luxury of being scrubbed with a luffa by a friendly human helper. On the rare occasion that she had a fresh Hunter corpse to inspect (she tried to avoid confrontation) she'd seen what looked to be a wide range of various superficial mutations, skin infections, and overtaxed immune systems. Disease and Charles Darwin, she wagered, would pick off a great number of special infected if food-scarcity didn't get them first. That thought was humbling: that the world would go on turning without humans, leaving only feral zombie apex predators for evolution to act upon-

-Evolution required generations. Could zombies breed? There was nothing about the Green Flu to explicitly suggest the infected were sterile, and the disease seemed to exhibit enough variability to suggest that somewhere, somehow, one individual from one subspecies would end up with the instincts and gross motor skills necessary to attempt sex and produce evil zombies babies.

But human babies did _not_ emerge from the womb capable of defending themselves; not even _close._ Even an evil zombie baby, with increased aggression and a hunger for brains, would be born incapable of recognizing anything at all around it, including food, and with insufficient motor skills to roll over onto its belly, much less crawl over to some discarded corpse and start gumming on it for nutrition.

For zombies to successfully procreate would require one special-infected, somewhere, to see a zombie baby and experience a primitive, instinctive trigger to _protect young_. Statistically speaking, how hard could that be? If Snickers could befriend The Great Can Opener, it wasn't implausible to assume another zombie might one day try feeding its own young, particularly if any hormones got involved during the labor. Zombie babies would likely be hardy enough to survive a half-assed parenting. All it would take after that would be enough luck for the offspring to make it to adulthood and keep breeding and keep feeding its descendants. Snickers lived off tuna, and so zombies could hunt animals.

Nature might find a way. Maybe. 

Maybe 'humanity' even still lingered in the zombie genetic code, somewhere. Maybe luck and statistics would eventually recreate intelligence from what remained, and it all wouldn't have been for nothing.

 _What is the point of being so damn morbid?_ Was humanity even dead? No one was directing radio waves her way, and no one had been for quite some time. But perhaps the rest of the world had simply given up on North America?

Sometimes she worried that if she stopped talking out loud to Snickers, she might forget how to speak.

"But that's right, it's past bath time, isn't it?" she startled herself out of her own melancholy. Snickers whirred peaceably, and rolled onto his stomach. Once weekly she _did_ try to get his whole outfit off, but on the days between she always made sure to at least sponge-bathe his joints. Rituals helped her count the days, the weeks, the months, the seasons...

"Do you ever think about the future?" she asked him rhetorically, as she bundled his hoodie up against his shoulders, and scrubbed and scrubbed to his persistent purrs. "Am I really the only thing left _in all the known universe_ still capable of any big questions at all?"

The way Snickers purred louder suggested he was actively and intentionally discouraging her from feeling lonely. And that, well, that would have to be enough.


	10. Unheard

The dog, sick with mange and splattered with Boomer pheromones, was doomed.

The Runners pursued, howling and gnashing their teeth in excitement, until at last they cornered it just under a building. They closed in without hesitance. The dog bit at them; they bit back harder; and it was several tears later before the tussle eventually put an end to its shrieks.

The grotesque sounds of phlegmy coughing and tearing flesh wafted gently up many stories above, to where she and Snickers watched the zombie procession from the safety of darkness.

The bulk of the party was still coming.

Like bees about their queen, the crowd of zombies swarmed upon the Boomer and its unmistakable aroma. They followed wherever it tottered upon its fat legs, mumbling incoherently to themselves as its drool and pheromones dribbled down the crevasses and boils of its belly. Whether it had once been male or female was difficult to ascertain; its saliva had long since destroyed all clothing and hair, and what remained of its flesh bulged in a saggy, swollen, and asymmetrical manner.

Its arrival fueled a growing feeding frenzy, but Boomer elbowed smaller bodies out of the way with easy sweeps of its massive arms. It plucked the canine remains one-handed out from the swarm with runners still clinging to the broken limbs, and then bit into the torn flesh with a cacophony of crunches and pops. Not all of said pops seemed to come exclusively from the meal, either; some, surely, had to do with the broken boils and ooze which leaked down the sides of its head. Any infected unlucky enough to still be clinging to the carcass at this point swiftly lost fingers or hands to the Boomer's appetite.

Above there was only silence. Calm, poised silence, pregnant with readiness that something unexpected might occur, but otherwise still and almost serene as they waited for the danger to pass.

She was hugging the wall against the window's right side, with only the nose of her suppressor visible in the moonlight as it steadied her aim against the sill. Her scope let her see everything she could want to see of the scene below (and plenty she didn't). Her Hunter was ready at a second window, alert but unmoving, his arm draped almost casually over the length of the sill and his chin resting upon his shoulder. He had been her tutor in this: In learning that safety came with going unseen and, therefore, unheard.

She'd never been a strong woman, and the Green Flu had forced her to confront the sad reality of how very little she had been able to really carry on her back over an average day of post-apocalyptic horror. Her weapon count and ammunition numbers had dwindled in the face of her need for water purification hardware, sleeping pads, and medicines. Multiple guns had been rendered impossible, as had carrying any dependable melee weapon. Her future had been sealed when she'd chosen a single-shot, long-barreled rifle: She'd ever after survive only by the virtues of patience and positioning. But she and Snickers were a team in that: They worked quietly, and efficiently; they took down isolated targets only in ideal circumstances; and they relied on ambush tactics, bottlenecks, vantage points, stalling tactics, and stumbling blocks. If this Boomer noticed them, for instance, she would need to kill it in a single shot. She and Snickers couldn't fight fair in any way—not when their party numbered only _two_ against legions, and an _unimpressive_ two at that.

It began to rain, faintly. The breeze picked up, so that the air was no longer so thick and muggy. She waited, feeling strangely like any normal bookworm curled up in the safety of their apartment window as a late summer storm blew in. The Boomer began to move again. It straightened, wobbled, and then began tottering on northward through the main road of town. Its swarm descended upon the animal scraps in a brief feeding frenzy, before they inevitably followed, with some members dragging tattered fragments of their kill along behind them: bits of bone, hair, sinew, and tendon.

When the crowd was long gone, she eased the nose of her rifle back into the apartment, and glanced over at Snickers. His nostrils flared as he quietly inhaled the smell of the rain. Then he eased his legs out in front of him, and rubbed his toes together as if to work out tension or jitters. A short while later, he pushed himself up to a squat and crossed the room to join her. Snickers didn't walk like a man; he clung to walls and rafters for additional support like a monkey, toddler, or invalid. He crouched before her and pawed gently at her arm.

'I watched you today,' he seemed to say without having any of the words to do so. 'Have you been thinking too much again? Do I need to pay close attention to you tomorrow?' There was still something _clever_ about Snickers, in the same way there was something clever about service animals. Now and then he reminded her of it, in the way he stared, and in the way his eyes squinted while he was thinking.

"I'm okay," she told him. If she wasn't, he'd know from the sound of her voice better than she did.

He bunted gently up against her shoulder, and then curled up into her and half on top of her—big heavy inconsiderate feline thing that he was!—to get some rest.


	11. Arm and a Leg

The city's utter desolation told a story of a time soon after the infection, where a military installation to the north must have done something to draw the attention of every zombie in town.

With the exception of one migratory Boomer and its posse, infected mutants looked to have abandoned the region. But, she reasoned: If guns had drawn zombies north, then guns could draw them south again. Suppressor or no suppressor, she didn't trust the volume of her rifle or the psychological allure of unguarded loot: Prudence would necessitate that she and Snickers move very carefully today. Any altercation or stumbling blocks needed to result in their swift, silent retreat.

"You need to be on your toes," she cautioned Snickers as the two of them slunk out eagerly together into streets. Today would entail replenishing a few generic supplies and then actually scouting out a _hospital._ For once, buildings which ought to have been death traps might actually yield invaluable resources. "If the Boomer doesn't catch a whiff of us, I won't have to shoot it. If I don't have to shoot it, we might get lucky."

Snickers huffed affirmatively and spidered up the porous the brick wall of an old firehouse to get a better vantage point. There were few climbing surfaces he liked _quite_ so much as he liked brick. Stucco, maybe, but one usually didn't see that in cities. By contrast, skyscraper glass was a plague on all Hunter kind, as it rendered their claws useless, provided no visual cover, removed allowances for mistakes, and left them dependent on depth perception and leg strength alone. Smokers, Smokers liked skyscrapers.

Nh, her mind had wandered again, and Snickers knew it before she did and hissed at her. Well, this was the sort of evidence that demonstrated she'd never been cut out to be a ranger. But that didn't matter: Whatever cards life dealt a woman, even if they were a bad hand, those were the cards one had to play with. _Focus. Breathe. Quiet everything down inside. Let your mind blank out and your senses blend into your surroundings._

Birds. Bits of grass, broken through the concrete, fluttering in a gentle autumn breeze. Heat: Damnably hot even for early morning. Shadow, cover, shadow, cover; post, garbage bin, car. They made their way across the city one obstacle at a time.

Ahead of them, a tin can rolled across the ground. Snickers was on the scene first, crawling near it across the architectural ornamentation of a bank. She saw the lone 'normal' infected shortly after he did, and then got to witness a beautiful jump as he cleared two dozen yards and landed flawlessly with toes and fingers leading. He pinioned his target down with a wet crunch, and then tore it in half at the midsection. Blood ended up everywhere. He tracked it about in happy whirls, as if marking territory in red, and then galloped back to her and crawled onto a car to sniff at the air and peer around for additional hostiles.

She hurried quietly over to the body to make sure that the zombie had actually died and wouldn't end up making any sort of noise— _always double tap—_ and then glanced back at where her Hunter had one foot lifted in the air and was licking his toe claws clean and pulling chunks of flesh loose from between them with his teeth. Well, that was always a delightful sight. Thinking back, she couldn't remember when Snickers had first started trying to groom himself after kills. Four months ago? Five? He finished and galloped along after her, where he paused only a moment to rub his shoulder up against her hip and then took to the heights of nearby buildings once more.

"Keep me safe," she murmured, only just realizing that her new reluctance to use the rifle had severely handicapped her ability to defend herself. Either she needed a temporary melee weapon, or she simply had to trust in the quality of her silencer.

It was a nice silencer, after all; she'd nearly paid an arm and a leg for it.


	12. BFF

Was this what he _thought_ it was? He halted and turned it over.

Well, it was definitely a firestick. It was elongated, and single-barreled, both good signs. The aperture would have fit large flame capsules, and it seemed to have a quieting scarf wrapped about the neck of it.

Interesting! BFF ought to see it! He snatched it up and twisted about, deciding the fastest route back to her.

As strange as it sounded, there were actually different kinds and qualities of firestick, and they all had differently sized flame capsules. BFF would stall mid-hunt to pick up and inspect new firesticks she found amid the forage. Occasionally she switched out her current favorite for something better, but her choices had looked similar for ages: long, quiet, and deadly.

(He suspected, with a note of pride, that she might have chosen these sorts of sticks to imitate _his_ way of stalking prey: Sticking to shadows and high vantage points, and picking targets carefully.)

He twisted his way through the handholds and footholds of the concrete remnants, and emerge on an overlook that gave him a good vantage point of his pack-mate. She was hunkered down and turning over a piece of forage in her hands, with her head tilting this way and that. To him it smelled like metal, but to her it likely had some interesting, unlockable potential. She understood found-items better than he did, but she had another advantage over him too: She—and maybe all demons?—could _envision_ things. Possibilities. Demons could put objects together and give those objects new properties.

She wasn't actually demonic. 

Maybe no demons were.

The first night he'd sat beside her, it had not been out of fearlessness. He had been very obviously bluffing confidence over his injuries, and had been hot, in pain, and hungry. But she had shared her food with him, and neglected to kill him, and these were typically good signs (and excellent manners) when they came from another Climber. So he'd crept closer and adjusted himself slowly to the violently hostile markers in her scent, to try and learn what her intentions were. A hunch—and maybe a desperation for comfort—had led him to realizing those hostility-markers in her smell had been _lies_.

BFF was not violent. She was more frugal with firesticks than he was with claws. She was more likely to pet than she was to nip. And, when she had food, she always, _always_ shared it.

That first night, he had sat with her and he had watched her suffer in the confines of her head, sleeping sleeplessly, tormented and perhaps slightly insane. She had chattered through it all in that alien, shrieky voice of hers, and she _had_ , for all the world, looked like a demon as she'd tossed and turned about.

But she had shared her food with him, and she had neglected to kill him, and so he'd stayed in quiet vigil over her all night as he'd tried to figure her out. Ever since that day he had learned that BFF was very _gentle,_ for all that her body language and smell were so horribly provocative. She liked to fix things. She liked to make things. She was very responsive to affection, and could scratch things quite efficiently without rending holes in them. She seldom got terribly irate and, when she did, she never lashed out with more than a smack. She gave him proper space when _he_ was irate (Though anything so much as _growling_ at her seemed terribly unnecessary, and even rude, even amid a hunger fog...)

A team. He and BFF were a team. He took care of the here-and-now, and she went off with that bizarrely capable but somewhat distressed head of hers and envisioned important goals to steer them towards. She kept them supplied with food and clean water, took care of their health, picked out excellent clothing without tearing any of it, and explained to him that rolling about in entrails to mask his scent was only a good idea _sometimes_ because it left him itchy and soggy afterwards, which usually mandated a switch in jacket. (He had lost many a good jacket that way.)

He felt calm. Never mind what she was; after so much anger and frustration and pain and heat and disorientation and hunger and hatred, BFF's big-picture oversight and mothering affection were the only things that soothed and secured.

He crawled down to her now, the new firestick still clutched safely between his teeth, eager to see her reaction to the gift. He couldn't quite tell, but he had a funny feeling it might just be a _good_ one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which the protagonist was finally given a name :|


	13. Whisper

This was a circuit board, the sort of which one might expect in a school science project or research prototype.

She turned it over and over in her hands, wondering if it had been damaged and also wondering if it was time to start reading up on technology to see if she could spark some life into the old wires and devices before they decayed into the post-apocalyptic landscape.

As strange as it sounded, the End of the World sure did involve a lot of reading. Reading about herbalism, about medical remedies, about how to set broken bones, about how to repair simple mechanical devices, about how to build a primitive generator, about how to purify water, on and on and on. The most useful books were the ones that had very nearly gone out of publication with the dawn of the internet: The local Yellow Pages. The only way to find specialty shops like hunting stores or gun shops without blundering down a thousand city streets attracting every zombie in the nation was to look up where everything was in the Yellow Pages.

A pleased snort interrupted her thoughts, and she looked to see Snickers crawling down to meet her with a—what exactly _was_ clasped between his teeth? She waved him close and then took the firearm gingerly from his grasp, looking over the length of it with steadily increasing wonderment. If she remembered her tattered gun mags right, this was a military grade sniper rifle. Yes, yes it was: The obvious Barrett Firearms logo on the side proved it. "Where did you get _this_?" she breathed, intrigued but uncertain if it would prove useful.

Once upon a time, she would have supposed a sniper rifle to be the ideal weapon for any sneaky survivor who liked to stay hidden in tall buildings. But back when she and Snickers still occasionally seen signs of other humans, she'd watched (and heard) some poor sod demonstrate just the opposite: Sniper rifles broke the sound barrier, and that ensured they always made _incredibly_ loud booms.

'Someone else' had learned all this that the hard way, so that she hadn't needed to, and while his safe-house had been swarmed by untold thousands of undead, she'd gotten a very gory and grisly demonstration of why it was important to read and understand gun specs. Now-a-days she saved clip-outs from gun magazines and studied them like flash cards.

(Her brain had to store a lot of information these days; she couldn't haul notebooks around everywhere she went. What she couldn't trust herself to memorize, she preserved on loose leaf paper, in her tiniest handwriting, inside a single manila folder.)

Regardless, the strange thing about the sniper rifle Snickers had brought her right now was its suppressor. What was the point of a suppressor if the whole gun would be making sonic booms every time it fired? She peered down the barrel and was surprise to see how wide the weapon had been chambered. These bullets had been massive. How massive? What exactly had this weapon been firing?

"Can you show me where you got this?" she asked with a glance at Snickers, hoping to learn more. "Show me? Please show me?" Snickers understood her request and crawled eagerly back up to his wall. Of course, she had to find a more easily traversal path by which to follow him.

Snickers led her around several buildings and then up into a makeshift birds nest where only blood and offal remained of the person who'd once owned the sniper rifle. She searched around and found a few unspent bullets, which she gathered up greedily to inspect. They weighed in her hand like ingots of lead. Her .22 long rifle bullets were _tiny_ beside it. More important than the size of the round, however, was what its size, shape, and manufacturer told her about the rifle. 

_This_ is _a Whisper .500_ _cartridge._ _This gun is for firing subsonic ammunition. It will be nearly silent._

If she was careful—God, if she was careful!—these monstrously heavy slugs would let her kill a special infected from half a world away, with nothing whatsoever to point the way home. How many were there? She gathered them all and laid them out before her: Twelve. Twelve bullets for a rifle of incredible properties with a gigantic payload which she would likely never again find ammunition for. She dare not trade in her main rifle for this, because .22 long ammunition was trivial to find and she could only carry so much of it at a time.

Could she handle the extra weight of a second gun, and maybe take the Whisper with her for short while? Surely she could keep it long enough to try and kill the Boomer? Yes. Yes, she just wouldn't bring it with her on any long or extended journeys. The Whisper's time with her would be scoped to this one city, for this one winter. (Unless she hid it between seasons and returned at some date in the future?)

She needed this. It was enormous. It was beautiful. It was black and pointy and somehow reminded her of Batman. She gathered the bullets in her satchel, and pulled the sexy sniper rifle over her shoulder. Snickers looked thrilled.

"You found this. You are a _genius,_ Snickers, _"_ she gushed in a tone people had once reserved only for babies and puppies. "Who's the smartest Hunter in all the land? Who is? _You are_!"

He puffed up under all this attention, recognizing it as praise even before she reached over to hug him. He huffed and mumbled happily, and gave her a little lick on the temple, and then rolled over and nearly on top of her to demand payment for his incredible mental acumen. This actually proved to be a terrible idea on his part, because he got a face-full of direct sun-light in doing so, and then immediately curled up in a hard flinch.

"Hey now! Careful!" she laughed, tugging his hood down low and holding it there.

She'd once seen a hoodless hunter stumble around in broad daylight, blind and screaming, until the pain had finally compelled it to rake out its own eyes. Hunters didn't have eyelids, and while many appeared capable of seeking out hooded clothing, shading their faces with an arm, or at least sleeping in some shadowed place during the day, others suffered from Green Flu variations that left them incredibly functionally handicapped. Doubtless, there was more than one blind hunter still crawling about out there, somewhere in the world, unable to comprehend that _covering their eyes_ would have been a much better solution to their sun problem. 

When (presumably) the stars faded from his vision, Snickers gave a bashful mumble and folded a forearm over his head to keep the hood down himself. She pet him along the flank and reassured his bruised pride: "Don't worry, I still think you're a genius." He hummed at the sound of her voice. She took the opportunity to have a good look at his old injuries in decent lighting

As frightening as Snickers' mouth was, his face had once been much, much worse. Daily maintenance had brought back full usage of what remained, and some kind of zombie regeneration had grown in cartilage and muscle up to partially support the jaw where proper bone had been obliterated. The entire area was always a healthy-looking whirl of healing pink and light green. Where one cheek had once been little more than dangling scraps of tattered flesh, tissue now stretched tight between a number of large triangular holes. Gum had built up on the top of the jawbone itself, and at least two teeth had reappeared on the top jaw where damage had been less extensive. She wondered if one day he might heal the whole of the wound.

She traced the tissue thoughtfully. He captured and teethed harmlessly on her fingertips, gentler and much more careful than even the sweetest-tempered of puppies (and with even more drooling). He'd done this before. She wondered if it was teething, or a suckling instinct, or if her long history of tending to his mouth had tied some sort of 'reassuring' instinct to the feel of her fingers about his teeth. It was times like these, when Snickers so very obviously could bite her hand clean off but didn't, when he'd just shown off his intelligence but still seemed mesmerized by her, that she reflected upon stories like _I am Legend_ , and pondered how little she really understood about the infected.


	14. Etiquette

The cat hissed and arched it's back, feinting small aggressive shuffles towards him.

Without missing a beat, Snickers did likewise.

This was unexpectedly sociable behavior from such a large mammal, and so the cat growled warningly, bluffed a forward lunge, and pawed at the air.

Snickers growled and pawed back!

The cat whirred with experimental hostility.

Snickers whirred just the same way.

Hmm, these were uncannily good social skills from a two-legger...

Reassured and emboldened by the man-thing's unexpected adherence to the proper greeting protocols expected of more civilized beings, the cat shrieked angrily and sniffed the air.

Snickers did the same thing, which was a good sign.

Fourteen rounds of forward shuffling, forward lunges, hissing, howling, and growling ensued, because fifteen would have been too many, twelve was insulting, and thirteen was only appropriate when greeting black cats.

Then, with preemptive rituals completed, feline and Hunter set to establishing an initial acquaintanceship by sniffing each other with intermittent growls and paranoid arched backs that would permit them to flee at a moment's notice, as was only right and prudent for anyone to do.

When each determined the other was neither food nor a competitive interloper, the cat made an impulsive decision likely brought on by the stresses and strains of post-apocalyptic living: It decided to shortlist him as a potential friendship candidate. To demonstrate this, it sprinted away, leaped onto a box, slowed to a leisurely stroll with its tail in the air and its butt fully presented, paused, and glanced back at them.

When no mongrel pursuit followed, the cat sat down and began grooming itself to demonstrate that it found him boring but non-offensive. Friendly overtures were now welcome, of course, but should only be attempted after a sufficient period of reflection for both parties: Say, two to three weeks. Alright, five days, but only for _him_ , and then only if he was still in the area by then. Truly, Snickers ought to have been honored.

Snickers likewise gave it the cold shoulder, as was only polite, but then apparently didn't know what to do after that. After a moment of staring at nothing, he perked up a bit and then slowly peered back over to where she had gone forgotten during the course of this Hunter/Cat cultural bonding event. After a moment of over-the-shoulder-peeking he turned about and padded back to her, looking somewhat bewildered but entirely satisfied by whatever had just happened between him and the small animal, and ignoring the cat just as politely as the cat was ignoring him.

She sighed and shook her head at him in dismay. "What I wouldn't give for YouTube, or Instagram, or... Or anything, right now. They'd have to re-brand it to make it morbidly comic in these trying times: YouTubez. See what I did there? That was a 'z' I added on the end, not an 's'. No? Nothing? Infectagram. GreenTube. YouFlu."

He didn't understand a word she was saying, and was probably wondering why she couldn't be as proficient in sane rational communication as that cat over there. She mimed taking a photo of him with a smart phone she obviously no longer possessed, and sadly posted the imaginary video onto an imaginary Facebook to share with her dead friends and family.

Snickers squinted, opened his mouth, shuffled in place, and then abruptly squeaked out a meow.

She nearly jumped out of her damn skin and stared wide-eyed at him.

The corners of his damaged mouth turned up, and he wiggled again before yowling out another long, excellently formulated meow.

She gaped for a long moment, and then gasped, flustered: "Why haven't you haven't so much as tried to mimic a single human word in all the time I've known you!?"

He meowed luxuriously, she slapped a hand over her face, and he broke out into the wheezy chortles and giggles that were his namesake.

"I hate you Snickers," she grumbled as he rubbed affectionately up against her legs. "Really, I do. Completely. All the way." He brushed up against her fingers and she cradled his head to her side and scratched under his ear. He grinned toothily (and slightly not toothily) up at her. "You won't try to mimic me? Not once? What about saying: 'I love you, Super Special Favorite Can-Opener.' Eh? Eh?"

Snickers wouldn't play her game, and instead twisted and turned as he enjoyed the good scratching. This time he was smart enough not to flop on her, at least.


	15. Splashing in a Cow

She snacked on a low quality blueberry muffin that had clearly been bombed with preservatives at its time of manufacture, and which, for that reason alone, had survived into the present day. The taste of bread—whatever the quality—was like heaven these days.

Beside her, Snickers was humming and mumbling as he enjoyed a heaping meal of fried dace and tomato sauce. She'd even found a real ceramic plate to feed him on, and fully expected to watch him lick every drop of nummy goodness off its surface (and perhaps chew on it a little) before he finished.

The two of them had gotten back to 'base' just before sunset, and she'd had enough time to light a small little fire to heat up his food before the glimmer of light might have given bright enough contrast to draw attention. Snickers was a sucker for hot food, and he was the only one around for her to spoil

The city was theirs.

To recap for herself: They had a roaming Boomer to avoid, and a few scattered Normals to dispose of, but thus far their surroundings had proven a paradise. The city featured all the resources they would ever need to start on many an interesting project (could she explain in words what joy she'd felt when she'd spied the door to the hospital's generator room?), coupled with danger levels lower than one might expect of a secluded farm house.

And what were the dangers? Primarily: Getting cocky and making a mistake. The city was not completely vacant, after all, and she and Snickers would also be living under a continuous threat of zombies returning from the north to investigate any loud noises. Still, the overall conditions made this an _ideal_ place to stop, live, and plan for awhile.

Her previous overarching goal had been to get herself and Snickers south for upcoming winter, but that was a now complete. It had been no easy project given the condition of bridges and cities; An open highway and a bit of gasoline were a free ticket to the illusion of safety and progress, as even the lowliest sedan or hatchback could outrun a Tank on a flat stretch of asphalt at full speed. But as soon as one came across a seven lane pile-up of cars, highways quickly lost their allure—often immediately after having streaked loud and fast across open terrain in full view of a lot of hungry hostiles.

But the two of them had made it, and made incredible timing at that. By now they were caught amid a mid autumn heat wave somewhere south of Atlanta, and while Georgia got nippy in February, it would be nothing next to getting encased in eight feet of snow upstate New York with a carnivorous roommate who was cranky, injured, and blinded by all the sparkling white ground cover.

(If there was any firm proof that Snickers genuinely loved her, it was in all the canned squash, crushed iron supplements, whey powder, and pork bullion she'd gotten away with feeding him on otherwise hopeless days. He'd certainly done a number on the first cow he'd seen afterward, and splashed about in the mess for hours like a toddler in a ball pit. Put things in perspective.)

Snickers paused in his eating and glared suspiciously up towards the ceiling. He was quiet for a moment, head cocked to the side, and then went back to his food at a slower rate of consumption, as if he were listening for something.

Hmm. What snuck about on tall buildings even when no food was readily nearby? It could have been a Normal trapped in a closet somewhere, but she figured she ought to plan for the worst: Hunters, Jockeys, Smokers, and strains yet unseen an unnamed.

She'd keep an eye out.


	16. Bye Bye

Snickers growled and jerked to the side, and she bolted after him. It had taken them two solid weeks for them to find this damn thing, and now they were close enough that even _she_ could hear it's coughing fits.

For the last two weeks, Snickers had been randomly dropping whatever he'd been doing to crawl off and investigate smells, but always he had come back empty-handed and grumpy. His quarry had been loud enough for him to overhear, clearly, but stealthy enough to elude him.

But now, as she followed her bounding Hunter around within the glassy public library, she knew exactly what had been bothering him: A Smoker. And they were _just_ about to pin it down.

Fights between a Hunter and Smoker typically boiled down to who saw who first. If the Hunter landed a jump, the Smoker would end up looking like shredded seaweed. Conversely if the Smoker managed to act first, the Hunter would wind up looking crushed to death by a boa constrictor. The risks involved had never deterred Snickers from leaving many a decapitated 'gift' on her bed for inspection come morning (further demonstrating that all Hunters were cats), and he'd ultimately left her with the impression that these lanky blighters amounted to his favorite sort of prey.

This time he'd deliberately called her in for backup, which she took to mean it was serious.

They'd temporarily lost their quarry, and so the two of them paused. She peered across the lines of books. Snickers waited silently and did not so much as sniff. Then, coughs gave their target away, and they resumed chasing.

Where was it going? The roof? Typically, Smokers did tend to exhibit an understanding of tactics, and would use height and terrain to their advantage. But if this individual was very obviously _clever,_ that might explain why Snickers hadn't chosen to take it down alone. They had an incredible advantage against it, two-on-one; it wouldn't be able to crush either of them to death before the other killed it. 

It _did_ head up to the roof. Following coughs up the janitorial access stairways, she and Snickers would have to be ready the very _instant_ they stepped out those doors. The Smoker had limited options, but it was always worth knowing what those options were: It had to either get one of them by the throat and swiftly crush the larynx, or throw one of them clear off the building; either option would leave it with a more favorable, one-on-one fight.

They emerged together from the top floor landing, and she spun about immediately to cover their backs. Standing above them and leaning on an antenna, one tongue protruding from a gaping hole in its left cheek and the tip hovering just over the top of her head, was a Smoker. Goat-like eyes with horizontal pupils and gray irises stared lifelessly through her. She didn't even have to lean into her scope to take aim.

"No!"

She hadn't been the one to speak. Snickers spun about with a cougar roar. Her finger stayed tight on the trigger of her Whisper sniper rifle, but incredulity kept her from pulling it.

The Smoker recoiled from her, and then picked his way around the opposite side of the antenna with his tongue still hovering threateningly close to her cranium.

"No!" he—the Smoker, the infected—repeated again, in a voice as hoarse and dry as the desert.

_You can speak?_

She hesitated, not moving, not releasing her stranglehold on the gun. 

A tense moment held them _all_ rooted in place. Snickers growled and padded forward an inch, but when no one and nothing attempted to kill anyone else, he paused and wrinkled his nose in an effort to divine what was happening.

The Smoker seemed to be staring straight at her, but that face and those eyes were devoid of expression when compared with how emotive Snickers could be, and she learned nothing from it. Movement caught her eye, and she took note of a second and third tongue curling about behind the Smoker, and that they looked to be emerging from his ear and from a large deformation along his shoulder and the side of his neck. The tongues wrung nervously at one another, like a normal person's hands. Her brows furrowed, and she looked back to its—his?—face.

She wet her lips, and asked a hesitant, "No?"

The Smoker looked from Hunter to Human, and then backed up and hunched down a bit, trying to get out of their line of sight behind the shape of the staircase roof. "No." He insisted in a muffled voice.

She poked the tip of his primary tongue with her rifle, because it was uncomfortably close. The tongue cringed and retracted like a startled eel.

"No!" he repeated firmly, and started shaking his head. "No, no, no, no." He shuffled further backwards and hunkered further down. He was now invisible, hidden behind the shape of the access stairway and its roof and walls.

_What do I do with this?_

She glanced down at Snickers, who appeared to find all of this suspicious but also unexpectedly interesting. She wondered if he could tell the Smoker was speaking Humanese, or if he was more focused on its smell and body language. His hesitation helped convince her she wasn't crazy, at least, particularly as Snickers seemed to hate (or love?) Smokers more than any other form of undead.

When the situation did not mature into violence, she decided that the only morally appropriate thing to do was to try and extend a peace offering and see what happened. Would he swipe at her? Lash out? She decided to proceed as she had with Snickers, took out her can opener, and popped open one of Snickers' least favorite cans: Chicken breast with lemon grass. Then she stood on her toes and hopped to tip the can up onto the little roof.

She stepped back quickly, but no tongues came after her. Up on the little roof, there was a brief quiet, followed by a long scrape which suggested the Smoker had pulled the can to himself for inspection. A few coughs and a few snuffles later, and the Smoker crawled hesitantly back into view, tongues wrapping about the architecture like octopus tendrils.

_This is bizarre, but no stranger than Snickers._

She tilted her head to the side, and wet her lips again. "Um. Hi?"

He had no facial expressions of any kind. His tentacles wormed nervously at the architecture. "H-hi."

Snickers wasn't sure he liked this, and pushed his shoulder against her leg to suggest she shoot the Smoker, retreat, or at least supply a good scratching. She rested a hand temporarily on his head to reassure him. "Can you talk?" she asked. "Sentences?"

The Smoker didn't say anything.

She took a deep breath. "You no hurt us, we no hurt you. Okay?"

Goat eyes remained dead-looking and did not squint in thought, but the twitching of his tendrils suggested he was trying to parse out what she meant. Then he looked down and she saw he was holding the can in both hands. "Thank y-you."

Invisible hands squeezed her heart. Maybe it was because his linguistic ability was presently on par with a small child's, and so made him pitiable, or cute, or... well her enthusiasm for this kill had certainly gone down through the basement. Could he just stay here and not attack them? Maybe.

"You're welcome," she murmured.

This seemed to be the right thing for her to say: The coupling of 'thank you' with 'you're welcome' seemed to reassured the Smoker that this whole conversation was a good one. He calmed down a little and then slunk backwards, and pulled his tongues away from their exit.

She took a deep breath and kept her rifle raised. Her shoulders were tense as she stepped gingerly back through the door, and Snickers seemed equally wary with his belly low to the ground and his head twisted sharply over his shoulder. The two of them made it safely back into the stairwell.

"Bye bye..." mumbled their newest neighbor.

She winced. "Bye bye," she called back, and then hurriedly led Snickers down and back home.

They were not coming near this Library anymore. Not until she'd decided what to make of this. God willing, the Smoker wouldn't come near _them_ , because either she or Snickers would have to kill him.


	17. Neighborly

Smokers were ambush predators, like antlions or preying mantises. They weren't exactly immobile, but their hunting strategies involved a great deal of waiting. They were reliant on identifying opportunities, setting up traps, and working to use the terrain to their advantages.

So, did she think their 'new neighbor' was inherently manipulative on every level? Was it logical to take his interactions at face value, or ought she suspect of malicious intent? He had seemed poised to grab her, after all, and only upon being spotted had he backed down. Had he so feared them? Had he simply been cowardly? Was there some chance he had used speech to get out of rough spots with humans before? If so, had he honored those 'agreements'?

Hunters were smart enough to work out a cunning little ambush, yet she'd never lost sleep wondering if Snickers might have been _manipulated_ her into taking care of him until he was well enough to kill her. Rather, she'd been much more concerned with whether he'd outright bite the hand that fed him out of a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. What was making her evaluate Smokers differently?

The neighbor had s _poken_.

Before the world had gone to hell, there had been plenty of dog lovers who would have sworn up and down before God himself that their dog's life was worth the life of any human, and therefore ought to have many of the same rights. That was what Snickers was: A non-human life of tremendous value who filled numerous roles: Partner, service animal, friend, family member, and protector. But by _speaking_ , the Smoker had somehow stepped entirely outside of that classification into something closer to home, something almost-but-not-quite human.

Humans were capable of more complex and confusing behaviors than animals. They could be good, but they could also be evil, manipulative, deceitful, craven, or sadistic. This was true even before considering what the Green Flu had done to infected instincts just in general. In fact, her new neighbor scared her in a way Snickers never had: An anxious, twisting way, in the pit of her gut.

The sun was up at full zenith and Snickers was napping away in the sunshine. She was using the excellent lighting to fiddle with a little circuit board over a book. Hnh. If she was already calling this Smoker 'a neighbor,' maybe she ought to name him 'Roger.' She winced at her own train of thoughts, both because of the innocent place she'd sourced the name from, and because it was so much more _human_ a name than 'Snickers.'

_It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day to be neighborly..._

She heard a cough, and nearly jumped out of her skin. Snickers didn't seem to register the sound immediately and may even have been sleeping, which was unfortunate given she did the most _stupid_ thing possible and stuck her head out the window. Even as her body slid into place, she registered she'd just given a Smoker a clear shot at her head, and that she was a dead woman.

But there 'Roger' stood, many stories below them, tongues wrapped in coils behind himself, holding an empty little can in both hands. He looked up at her with those dead gray eyes, out in bright sunlight with no hiding place in any direction, and _he_ looked vulnerable.

She glanced over at Snickers, swallowed past adrenaline, and then turned about to fish around for a can. She opened it, placed it in the window sill, and then scooted away from the light.

After about sixty seconds of waiting, the tip of a tongue came up over the edge, dabbed around for the can, found it, coiled about its length, and then stole it quietly out of the sill.

She shrunk into herself and hugged her knees to her chest, feeling awful in about six different ways.

_He's hungry. They're all hungry. The Green Flu was just an unintelligent virus; it wasn't trying to build a new ecology; it didn't necessarily leave them with the skills to survive._

She pressed her face into her knees.

_They are going to die out. Starve to death. If they're all that's left—if we're all dead—is it immoral to help some of them survive?_

_Are they all that's left to save of us? Of what we were?_

She got up and stumbled over to Snickers, and shook him awake. He mewled in confusion at her, and then snorted and snuffled in confusion as she quickly stuffed herself into the space beside him and got underneath oneof his arms. He grumbled and sniffed uncertainly over her hair, and then curled up around her and licked her hair. For once, she was happy to be drooled on.


	18. Head Wound

She didn't think to memorialize October 2nd, the day of the outbreak, until it was too late. Then she felt incredibly guilty for having forgotten so many lives lost.

The days churned by, rolling into weeks and months. With December fast encroaching, the heat had died. Chilled wind blew in from the north, mingling with airs from the gulf, and occasionally summoning up quick, Floridian rains.

They—she and her Hunter—were shopping for winter clothing at the mall when distant coughing put Snickers on edge. He immediately set off in search of the noise, so she drew out her .22 and crept out into the atrium to use herself as bait. Was this Roger? Unlikely. Roger had occasionally found them out on a hunt before, but Snickers had always stuck near her during those times and postured and paced more than he had actively hunted. He didn't necessarily trust Roger, but he also wasn't opposed to bumping in to him now and then. 

Anyway, she kept her back facing one direction, braced her feet, listened, and waited. And while she didn't hear anything coming for her, but she certainly heard Snickers roar a warning, so she lunged forward into a roll. A tongue slapped up against one of her legs, twisted, and yanked.

She was five feet off the ground and upside down before she knew anything else, but her arms were free and she was facing the right direction. She pointed her gun towards her toes, caught the Smoker in her sights up near the glass dome of the ceiling, and squeezed the trigger before it could shake her about or smash her into anything. Bam. She knew she hit it only because the Smoker recoiled, but that was plenty of time for Snickers to score a leap from the top of an overgrown potted palm tree: He hit the Smoker, grabbed its legs out from underneath it, bit into the stomach area, and elicited a pained and startled holler.

The tongue gave a wild fling, and the she wasn't aware of much anything else until Snickers was padding up beside her and pawing worriedly at her face. She groaned, and rolled over onto her back. Well, she was now on the bottom floor of the mall instead of on the top. Everything hurt, but a cursory wiggle and head patting suggested she'd neither concussed herself nor broken anything. Not for the first time, she reflected that her own post apocalyptic survival had always involved a lot more luck than it had skill. By the look of things, she must have landed on the fancy cloth roof of a stall and rolled off, breaking her fall distance in half. Next time," she told Snickers, "you get to be the bait."

He licked her face, and then promptly presented her with the main tongue of the newly decapitated Smoker head he'd just dragged up to gift her with.

"That's beautiful Snickers," she gingerly sat herself up, and was at least relieved to see this hadn't been Roger. "Thank you very much." She steadied herself on him and pet him, and then wondered why there was so much sweat on the right side of her face. Snickers giggled and licked her her again and again, and she realized it wasn't sweat; She'd cut her brow and the injury was bleeding copiously. Head wounds: They always did that.

"Oi," she muttered, and then rummaged around for her medical kit. "At least this place is full of decorative mirrors, since you suck so badly at holding hand mirrors still for me."

The sound of the .22 hadn't been particularly loud, and she'd found it a more comfortable and familiar weapon to carry around with her than the Whisper, but she was still going to cut their shopping trip short for the day. The noise _might_ be enough to attract the roving Boomer and its posse, if it just so happened to be nearby, and those weren't risks she was prepared to take. They'd neatly avoid it by heading home early, and working on something else. 


	19. More New Neighbors

By the look of Snickers' agitation, something altogether exciting had just waltzed into the city.

A Tank? He would have been more cowed. A Smoker? He would have immediately gone hunting.

He paced and repeatedly poked his head out over the window and flared his nostrils. When he took up sniffing and whimpering confusedly, she eased her rifle out into the sill and squinted past the barrel to see if she could determine what all this hubbub was about, or, at least, where to point her scope.

Shapes were on the road, waiting for one another and traveling in a snaky line that wound shadow to shadow. "Is it-?" Only people traveled on the ground and worked as a team like that! She ducked quickly to her scope to get herself a better look, and though she was not surprised to be proven wrong, she _was_ rather confused at how four Hunters were all together in one spot without ripping each others' throats out. Four? Five. She'd almost missed a point guard trotting in advance of his troupe. That they were traveling on the ground was peculiar but, on reflection, it also let them keep track of one another. They looked alert and wary and poised to run or fight at a moment's notice.

This wasn't just 'five hunters;' this was a _pack_ . Reverently she shook her head, because she might as well have been looking at wolves "And tonight, Mother Nature will be awarding the Niche of Group Survival Tactics to... drumroll please... _Hunters._ "

If they had only just arrived in the city then perhaps they would pass on through, finding little to eat. If they stayed, she and Snickers were going to have one hell of a difficult time staying hidden from so many new Hunters in an otherwise vacant city.

She looked from individual to individual, marking their clothing for future reference. The garments looked unexpectedly new and un-shredded. Were they benefiting from their shared pool of memory remnants? Had one of them mastered clothing? If his-or-her taste in garments were any indication, three hunters were male and two were female. Without any bared arms or legs, she couldn't make further judgement of their skin condition or overall health.

How many of them could she kill? It depended on whether she could get one or two of them out alone. It depended on whether they really did hunt together, or simply lived and traveled together, and it depended on whether they were sickly enough that Snickers could kill one on his own despite his missing teeth. They looked vaguely organized: One even traveled out on the group's exposed flank as if to intercept dangers headed for the center of the column. If she could set up a trap-

-What was-?

"Oh my God..." she breathed, because the second hunter from the rear was indisputably female; her belly was so ovoid and so big that it very nearly brushed against the ground, and the shape of it was not in any way mistakable for a tumor. The female was gravid. Behind her, the rearguard male repeatedly paused to let her set the pace, and occasionally growled out for the lead to slow down.

Pregnant. She was pregnant. Her jean jacket and hood were bright blue and clean against an otherwise bleak world. She had to be on the verge of giving birth with a stomach like that and, by the tight defensive column it had organized around her, her packmates actually _knew_ it. Maybe they'd even brought her here to where there was little food but also little danger so that she could deliver the—the pup?—safely.


	20. It Rained

It rained.

It rained and rained and rained. The wind blew in a violent and unrelenting howl that rattled the walls. He didn't like the trembling and the banging and the whirring and the _noise_ , and yet there was nothing for him to do: So he paced about their den to try and relieve himself of the too-many stimuli. Even the air itself seemed to feel wrong: Too light or, maybe, too heavy.

And BFF was utterly _useless_ , too. She sat with a book in her lap but her stare fixed vacantly out into the distance; her whole brain constipated with old pillow cotton, and choked on thoughts much too big to properly swallow. She seemed oblivious to everything, even with _him_ cooped up jittery in the same room!

He paced angrily back to her and yowled to let her know her attention was demanded. Surprisingly, BFF only winced and looked away. He recoiled in bewilderment. A wince? Why? What was the meaning of this? Were the two of them strangers that she should mistrust him so? Had her brain once more contracted some malady of Ideas and Stress?

Absurd! No, this simply must have had to do with the pack. And was it _his_ fault that she _thought_ about these things instead of simply going out to run, fight, posture, or—at the very least— _smell_ these new interlopers? Of course not! He grumbled and muttered and finally pushed himself in between her and her _nothing_ to occlude her _non-vision_ of it.

Many rooms away, a window shutter cracked free of its moorings, and the glass shattered with a crinkle, a crackle of appliances, and a bang as something heavy hit the ground.

Startled out of her arcane stupor, BFF finally looked up to see their own gaping windows, now splattered with a muddy shrapnel of debris, rust, and all the varied leavings of a strangely abandoned world. She gained her feet and hurried up to it. The air outside was _black_ with grit. He peeked out beside her and then looked up worriedly to her face. She had a very expressive face.

"It's a hurricane," BFF told him, sounding awed. These were the times he was at the absolute mercy of BFF's old-world intelligence. She could identify so many _things_ he could not; had so many _words_ he did not; and for all that 'thinking' itself was clearly a burden on her, it also gave her a nearly magical power.

That was probably why the Cougher kept coming near to see her, nearer than was _polite_ , nearer than was _safe_ ; it craved her understanding.

"It's not a _small_ hurricane." BFF looked to him and twirled a finger lazily in the air. "We're inside of it, but we should be okay."

He concentrated very hard, because he wanted to think about all of this without losing his train of thought. Grr. Losing his train of thought was more than a looming threat: Every nerve in his body was alight with useless energy.

Hmm. After the snow time and melting time, Snickers and BFF had seen cyclone dancing like a nimble white finger, white as snow. BFF had been afraid of it, and he hadn't understood. Then it had touched the ground and dirtied itself and shrieked and shrieked, much worse than this, and thrown all manner of object into the air. Snickers had seen it uproot a tree!

Spinning wind... Were they inside something like that? Inside a whirlwind? It must have been a very different sort of whirlwind, to look and sound so different and to be so big; and BFF didn't look half so frightened. Maybe 'fat storms' were like The Fat People: The bigger they were, the slower they wobbled... That made a sort of sense. Did that mean storms could puke?

His thoughts had derailed, and it took him more than a moment to realize they had and to wrinkle his nose at it all. BFF made thinking look easy; so easy one could get lost in it. Hey! She was looking back to her seat, and that would not do; he needed much more attention from her lest his nerves drive him crazy. He yowled and pawed at her, and when she didn't understand him he curled up about her legs and sat on her foot.

"Snickers! What are you-?"

He whined, because she'd been ignoring him for _days_ and that wasn't right or fair at all.

And BFF _laughed_ , yes! Excellent. And she reached down to him and pushed the edge of his hood back and scratched at the better side of his face and behind his ear and up through his hair. He hummed and purred and squirmed. Yes, yes, much better, _much better_. She laughed a little more and leaned over, and used both hands to scratch in big vigorous circles about his scalp, and he melted. Ohhhh, her not-sharp-claws were very nice. Very very very nice. He couldn't do the same thing, not even with his _feet_. Too sharp. Always left scrapes behind. Mnnn.

Thinking People like BFF might have smell liked monsters/food/demons, but they _weren't._ Thinking People were excellent. They just needed Climbing People to take care of them, was all. And to put down their firesticks now and then and give scratchies and open cans. Though that was was probably much easier when no one thought they were monsters/food/demons first or tried to kill them. Hmm.

 _Oh yes, scratch there, there!_ He tapped a foot rapidly on the ground, because that was _so nice._

"Ha! Have you eaten lately...?"

 _No! No and neither have you!_ He howled at the terribleness of it all, but then got off of her feet so she could attend to this matter. Not-eating was a grave crime. Grave! He followed her over to search through their cans (where she found all the tins of tuna he'd, um, _somewhat neurotically_ been chewing on in an effort to sooth himself).


	21. Counting

Snickers crawled gingerly through the cold and the wet and the mushy: The world as it was after the hurricane, with an overcast sky and a whole lot of _everything_ scattered _everywhere_.

He was downwind of the interlopers for the time being, but he couldn't be sure he had all of them accounted for. Their scents mingled and merged, and their den smelled strongly of all of them simultaneously, which could make it difficult to keep track of the whereabouts of all five. (Five? One, two, three, four—aha! Yes, five, the same as he had fingers on a hand. Very convenient to remember, one of BFF's easier words. Four had been much harder.)

Snickers had filled up on tuna and peach cobbler filling the night before, and then curled up against BFF's side contemplating her once-incredibly-provocative-but-now-very-comforting smell. He tried to think (he just would never be as good at that as BFF was), and he realized her _smell_ was part of the problem with the interlopers.

In the beginning, everything had been much noise and anger and pain and confusion, and a great deal of adrenaline-filled clawing and biting and eating and attacking had all gone on. But with time (and with the advent of hunger and pain and cold), everyone had slowly settled down and begun employing their senses again. After all, not every meeting between Climbing People had to end in hostility... they could simply strut about and hiss and spit for awhile, and then sort of just _mind each other's territory_ and go eat in different places instead. Very civilized and such.

Sometimes, they would even group up in twos, or in threes. Packs meant a certain amount of safety, especially during daytime or when witches, coughers, or other dangers were too plentiful; but they also meant competition, and, potentially, more danger.

Given Snickers himself had BFF as a companion, it didn't take a particularly big stretch of his imagination to understand how the interlopers might have come together into such a large group: By sharing food, sharing hunting skills, sharing nesting places during the cold-snowy-bright time, etc, etc. Such Climbers might be reasonable people, right?

And the city was plenty big enough and empty enough that maybe some Climbing People here and some Climbing People over there, and some Fat People and Coughing People could all _basically_ get along (if they minded each others' territory (which the stupid Cougher _didn't_ , but... then he was also the only healthy-and-hungry-person Snickers had _ever_ seen voluntarily back down from a fight with BFF, so one supposed he deserved some special allowance)) if—wait, what had Snickers been thinking about again?

Oh yes, BFF. BFF _couldn't_ live in peace anywhere, because BFF smelled like a devil-food-monster-prey-thing. If proper Climbing People were to discover her, it would all immediately become _kill-or-be-killed-hunting_. Which was troubling because the weather was getting _cold again_ , and so leaving the city would be _bad,_ and five was more than two which meant a full-blown brawl would be difficult.

So, IN CONCLUSION, BFF absolutely couldn't negotiate a territorial dispute on their behalf.

But _Snickers_ might be able to do so, and that was why he was out today. He would go close and investigate the interlopers' situation and get a sense of what they were doing and where they were hunting, and see how they interacted with one another. If it looked like they might be tolerant of strangers, perhaps he'd introduce himself. Just to be sure, he'd rolled in some good dung that morning to mask anything BFF had left on him. On the other hand, if they were unfriendly, he and BFF would have to stalk them and kill them one at a time.

 _Ah_.

There, he had found them. He perched in the twisted eaves of a shattered brick building, looking down across the alleyway at the broken craters some long-ago bomb (or Tank, eek ) had left in the ground. It was partially in the sewers and protected by a canopy of rusted girders and bent rebar, but it was surely a _nest_. Snickers could see that it was positively replete with fabric on the inside (and actually he was very slightly jealous; why didn't he have a nest like that?) Two of the males were there, lounging in patches of the afternoon sun and picking at old bones. A female smelled to be within.

 _How many are missing?_ He used his fingers to count. _Two missing_. He needed to back up and get into a less obvious position, where he might get a glimpse of either the hunter or huntress returning with food. If he could get a sense for their 'territory,' he could possibly bluff them into staying away from _his_ territory (and therefore also away from BFF).

Crackle Crackle.


	22. Hisser and Roaress

Snickers twisted about and caught sight of a hooded figure sniffing his tracks. It froze as it saw him, and he sized it up. _Smaller._ He parted his jaws and croaked low and deep to warn it back from him. _Smaller. Lighter_.

The other hunter bristled, hissed, and scrambled backwards a few steps. Snickers had to fight off instincts that told him to pounce. He had moments to make a good decision or a terrible mistake, and he still didn't know where one of the interlopers was. He could pounce now and try to snap this little hisser's neck, but if it had _backup_ then he might never get away in time before the pack converged on him.

 _And I'm supposed to be nice. Nice like BFF. I should move smooth and slow, not fast and hungry._ He closed his mouth and slunk carefully down out of his perch to deny himself the high-ground. The interloper hissed, and spat and snapped teeth at him from afar, which was normal given their size differences.

_I am not hostile. See?_

Snickers cooed.

Hisser stiffened and looked him up and down, no doubt stricken and puzzled by his choice of approach.

Snickers cooed again and settled himself down against the floor. _I'm a friendly, friendly, pettable puddle of warmth. See? And much too fat to be weaker than you, so don't get any rude ideas._

Hisser stared at him for a moment, weaving hesitantly from side to side. Then it—or he?—spidered tensely closer and stretched out to sniff at him curiously. Hisser was male and his breath and claws were bloodied, so he mustn't have been particularly hungry at the moment. This was good. Snickers mewed to continue to establish his non-hostility.

But then another interloper bounded into view behind them, crunched her claws into the threshold to make for a leap, and _screamed_ a roar. Answering roars chorused up from the nest site. Snickers stiffened and stared in dismay.

_You nasty, mean, uncouth piece of-!_

Roaress charged at him, and Snickers had no choice but to shove a terrified and confused Hisser backwards into her. Crackle-Thud-Roar. _Run away!_ He leaped up for the broken ceiling. Roaress extracted herself from Hisser and lunged for Snickers's feet, but betime she arrived Snickers had clambered to the next floor. _Flee the building!_ Snickers lunged for the window frame, crawled out it, and climbed up and up just as numerous claws reached the brick below him and started to follow.

He'd have to travel wide around the city; if he ran straight back to BFF and the Hiding Place, then everything would break out in a fight then-and-there. That would be bad! This was _all_ _five_ and he and BFF were only _two_ and those were not good numbers at all! He reached the rooftop, slick as it was with muck, and picked his way along to a jumping point.

ROAR.

Roaress was unexpectedly fast and surprisingly clever; she had backtracked through the building and climbed up on the opposite side, blocking his escape. She clawed shrieking gouges open in the rooftop as she mounted it, and glared at him with an arched back and all fingers splayed out for attack. She was _big_. Not as big as him, but still _big._ He hesitated, because there was no easy way past her and he couldn't risk a fall. The sound of claws-on-bricks behind him warned he didn't have much time to plot an alternative route. To the left the building was very nearly demolished. To the _right_ was a whole bloody _river_.

Oh.

Oh _no_.

The river.

Horrible flashbacks flittered through Snickers's mind. _Do I really have to...?_ But he _could_ , and BFF had made sure he could, and most other healthy-and-hungry people _couldn't_ , and there didn't look to be any other way across it...

Roaress prowled towards him. Another hunter clambered up on the roof behind him.

 _This is going to be terrible._ He bounded over towards the roof edge facing the river, took one last glance behind him at the assembling interlopers, and then steeled himself to become _incredibly wet and disoriented and unhappy_.

He jumped.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like me as an Author you are free to check out my profile, or find us on [Discord!](https://discord.gg/MsSfwNb) Otherwise just leave me loads of comments. I love comments <3
> 
> This story was originally on ff.net, which has not aged well. AO3 will be its new permeant home, where it will get a few gentle touch ups.


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